OPEN GOVERNMENT PARTNERSHIP Paris as an Open Local Government
Dear members of the Steering Committee, The city of Paris is proud to submit its application to the Open Government Partnership. The following document shows our commitment to build and share an open local government experience. Anne Hidalgo Mayor of Paris
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CITY OF PARIS
PARIS has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants while its metropolitan area exceeds 10 million. It is a very dense territory accounting 21000 inhabitants /km². Different public authorities are involved in the territory s management through different regulatory powers: the City of Paris, the French state, the Regional Council and the emerging Greater Paris administration. THE CITY OF PARIS management has long been ruled by the French State: a tradition of centralist practices and 3 revolutionary periods in the 18 th and 19 th centuries explain why the first elected mayor was appointed in 1975. The mayor of Paris is elected by the council of Paris. The City of Paris is divided into 20 districts, each with its own council and district mayor. Each district is then divided into neighborhoods with its own neighborhood council composed of inhabitants and NGOs. The organization of the city is still evolving with the creation of a public authority at the metropolitan scale. Thus, Paris involvement into the Open Government Partnership will take place in a dynamic institutional context in which governance practices are still evolving and becoming stronger. The city of Paris is clearly a leader on these topics inspiring others cities that take part in the new metropolitan area. ANNE HIDALGO was elected Mayor of Paris in April 2014. She made strong decisions to support, improve and develop innovative public services, improve access to cultural and natural resources for all and involve the public in the decision making process. Pauline VERON has been appointed the deputy Mayor in charge of Local democracy, citizenship participation, associative life, youth and employment: all these topics are thus apprehended in a systemic manner. It shows the Mayor of Paris is convinced that public involvement in decision making is key for handling the major employment and social challenges the city is facing. Yet the City of Paris endorses the belief that strengthening governance through citizens empowerment and new technologies development is a key factor of success in order to ensure a transparent and accountable implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which the OGP is committed to.
OPEN GOVERNMENT IN PARIS
THE CITY OF PARIS has defined its 2020 and beyond strategic framework for a smart and sustainable Paris. This strategy includes our ambition for open governance and citizens involvement. Yet the City is coordinating a community of stakeholders and facilitating the creation of new public services and devices devoted to a better city management and an optimized quality of public services. The development of these new services is participatory, as shown by the recent security hackathon during which start-ups, citizens, NGOs gather to develop new solutions for security improvements inside the city. In 2015, Parisians and civil servants were invited to take part in a public consultation dedicated to the improvement of access to public services. Our roadmap is exploring different dimensions of open government that are already being implemented and continuously improving: TRANSPARENCY The city has released 175 sets of Data (+ 5 million datalines) on its open data platform elaborated after consulting the needs of members of the open data community. Data has been downloaded more than 120.000 times, mainly for city s administrative purposes. Yet innovative dataviz and new services are being developed through the platform with the objective of empowering all stakeholders and sharing knowledge for a more distributed power to act. Open data are released on many topics: transportation, public spaces, environment, demography, local financial figures etc etc The open data strategy of Paris is also about democracy and better knowledge of the municipality. Amongst the data published can be found data about civil servants, work load, promotions, etc. Innovation contests such as Moov in the City are organized by the municipality to encourage companies to open their data and help start-ups jump start their businesses by using it. Paris has just announced the nomination of a Chief Data Officer. The CDO is in charge of all data related matters and the extension of the open data initiative, one of his duties is to further data literacy and opening of new datasets. Paris is also experimenting datascience through the call for proposals DataCity. Alongside big corporations, the municipality is trying to solve urban challenges thanks to datascience (example: how to achieve better local mobility). All reports of the city s internal audit office are made public and all political groups can propose tropics of investigation The members of Paris Council have to release a declaration of interests and patrimony when appointed
BETTER ACCESS TO PUBLIC SERVICES The city is offering new online services each year. Before being launched, they are all tested by user panels to ensure that they will be accessible to everyone. For all services we maintain an easy and customized physical access to include people who are not at ease with digital devices. At the same time, we offer assistance to reduce this digital divide and to help all people reach autonomy in a digital environment. Our quality of services framework QualiParis makes sure that all user remarks are taken into account to continuously improve our quality of services. Around 600 city services have obtained the label until now. We are about to experiment a mobile city hall in a bus in order to reach people who face difficulties with institutional interactions. We are in the process of simplifying our administrative forms so that they can be understood by everyone. COLLABORATION Organizing partnerships and breaking down institutional silos are at root of our open government strategy. An extensive map of stakeholders is designed to support the participatory processes and the incentives for cross sectorial cooperation are organized inside the City. The participatory budgeting process is an interesting example since the process: Aims to reach inhabitants that are usually not involved into public decision making through partnerships and innovative participatory processes. For example, we have decided to include the kids in our participatory budgeting: There is no age limit to submit an idea or to vote. We also pay attention to include the inhabitants from working-class neighborhood which are often less keen to be part of participatory process and also the non-eu citizens who still can t vote at municipal elections. Enhances cooperation between different divisions of the city such as decentralized services (located in the 20 districts), technical and administrative services through the implementation of shared data, networks and infrastructures Calls for enhanced cooperation between administrations in order to answer inhabitants projects that fall outside the scope of the city s regulatory power.
PARTICIPATION Participatory processes are at heart of our open government strategy. The practice of public participation includes 122 neighborhood councils, youth council, local council of non-eu citizens. It might also involve public meetings, surveys, open houses, workshops, citizen s advisory committees, participatory projects and gardens and other forms of direct involvement. Thus various projects take place to strengthen participation: Citizen kiosque : located on public spaces in different areas of the city, they are managed by citizens that are willing to organize neighborhood and social events, hold association meetings, activities and concerts. These Kiosques are genuinely dedicated to inhabitants who decide how to use it. The consultation platform Madame la Maire j ai une idée: dedicated to collecting inputs and ideas related with local policies, such as Paris strategy for climate and biodiversity, city s application for the 2024 Olympics or proposals for strengthening governance and democracy in Paris. Thousands of Parisians took part in the ten consultations led on this platform since 2015. The citizen card, allowing free access to local, national and international events related with democracy in Paris, to discover the foundations and daily operations of the City and to get access to public services such as libraries The popular university of active citizenship, which consists of 90 free training sessions that are opened to all organizations and inhabitants each year The great night of debates : On april 2 nd, Paris will be on the scene of debates through the whole city. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo is calling all the citizens to organize and participate in debates of any public area, including cafés, bars, universities It is a genuine invitation to meet, talk and discuss and reinforce our democracy The city of Paris launched in 2015 a website dedicated to the citizens petition. It is a way to call to mind the members of the Paris council. If a petition gains more than 5.000 supporters, the petition is added to the agenda of the council of Paris Anne Hidalgo decided to implement a participatory budgeting process allowing inhabitants to decide how to spend half a billion euros until 2020 (approximately 100 million euros of public investment per year). In 2015, 5000 proposals have been submitted and 70 000 inhabitants have chosen 188 projects that are currently being implemented. In 2106, the emphasis is put on the poorest neighborhoods with 30 over 100 M allocated for these areas. 10 millions euros are also dedicated to a schools participatory budgeting.
The way further : strengthening the open government in Paris through our involvement into OGP
Our OPEN GOVERNMENT STRATEGY is growing: new partners are involved, more inhabitants are mobilized, and more data are released each year in Paris. Yet our open government strategy is an iterative and innovative process under continuous improvement. Thus it is of primary need for the city of Paris to share its experience and gain insights from peers and reviewers. Our aim is to also help SPREAD OPEN GOVERNANCE PRACTICES since we believe this is a key to meet social, economic and environmental challenges that our local authorities and territories are currently facing. These challenges show that our societies are evolving in a more complex and uncertain environment. Their resiliency is at stake. The city of Paris is thus willing to build its open governance in order to strengthen its sustainable and resilient development. A growing ADMINISTRATION DEDICATED TO CITIZENSHIP PARTICIPATION and open governance: for ten years, the number of civil servants dedicated to local democracy, citizenship participation and open data keeps increasing. In 2014, a department dedicated to smart city initiatives has been created and reports directly to the General Secretary of the City of Paris. With the development of participative initiative, the department of citizenship participation should remain on a growing trend. The strong political support of the project makes the job positions in this department very attractive. The participation of the City of Paris to the local government OGP pilot program can boost our numerous projects and disposals, notably by SHARING EXPERIENCES AND VISION with other pioneer cities involved in open government process. The improvement of our practices can also attract other cities, especially the ones which signed partnership agreements with us, and encourage them to implement open government policy.